Turner, J. M. W., the most celebrated of English landscape-painters, is generally believed to have been born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, on the 23d of April 1775, but he himself said to Mr Cyrus Redding that he was born at Barnstaple in Devonshire. His full names were Joseph Mal-
Copyright 1892 in U.S.
by J. B. Lippincott
Company.
lord William, of which he signed only the initials.
He was the son of William Turner, a barber, who taught him to read and sent him to school at Brentford and afterwards to Margate, but he had little regular education and remained almost illiterate through life. He may possibly have heard something about Rome and Carthage at Brentford, cities that always had a great interest for him. Very early in life he got some initiation into architecture and worked with the architect Hardwick, who perceived his natural gift for painting and recommended him to become a pupil of the Royal Academy. Turner's childhood was remarkable for the absence of any civilising feminine influence. His mother is said to have had an ungovernable temper, and to have been almost if not quite insane. In other respects the early life of Turner was more fortunate. He soon found friends and instructors. He knew Sir Joshua Reynolds and studied in his house. He got an early initiation into water-colour through his acquaintance with Dr Monro and Girtin, and, being in a city where art was to be seen, he became acquainted with most of the elder masters of landscape, at least in their works, and with those of the then modern water-colour painters. Turner began exhibiting at fifteen when still an incipient student, but such was his precocity, and perhaps also the relatively low state of art at that time, that he went on exhibiting and learning during the same years. At eighteen he began to travel, being sent by a publisher into four English counties, and at twenty he had visited Wales. A year later he made architectural drawings in some of the principal English cathedral cities. Like Titian he was wide-awake and hard at work already in his profession early in the morning of life. On attaining his majority he was already an established artist, and as early as 1799 he began as a marine painter. In the same year, at the age of twenty-four, he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. At twenty-eight he was elected Academician, and at thirty-three professor of Perspective. During these years he does not appear to have earned a large income, but being a strict economist soon knew how to place himself above pecuniary difficulties.
The biography of Turner is of little interest except as a study of character. He never married, he took no share in public life, kept aloof from society, and knew no changes, except a few changes of residence in England and his home or foreign tours. Though economical to miserliness, after 1808 he had always two residences and sometimes even three. This indulgence may be attributed to a love of personal secrecy and obscurity. His town-house in Queen Anne Street was a sufficiently commodious residence with a studio and a gallery; his country-houses were first at Hammersmith and afterwards at Twickenham. By hard work and economy Turner soon attained pecuniary independence, and worked in complete freedom from any money-pressure, yet with remarkable rapidity. His travels were of the nature of furtive disappearances; he wandered much about England, France, Switzerland, and Italy, but the story of these excursions is told by his works alone, except that some chance traveller met him now and then, always with his pencil in his hand and travelling very economically, for the most part on foot. That his travels were a part of his life is indicated by the title of one of his publications, Turner's Annual Tour. He rose very early in the morning, worked many hours each day and always in complete secrecy, and it is not believed that in his own house he ate any regular meals. His houses were very badly kept, even his gallery of pictures being dirty and disorderly. So he went on in solitary toil till old age, and died in his seventy-seventh year (19th December 1851) in a temporary lodging at Chelsea under the assumed name of Booth.
Everything in Turner is indicative of the man of genius. His artistic gift was a special faculty, cultivated to the utmost by a long life of the hardest labour and to the neglect of everything else. The artistic gift that absorbed all his energies was itself of a most peculiar character. He perceived more in nature than any landscape-painter who had preceded him, yet at the same time his imagination was so overpowering that it modified all his materials. His power of drawing was remarkable both for strength and for an extreme refinement, but accuracy was made impossible for him by his constant desire for beauty or sublimity of line and for agreeable composition. He habitually increased the relative height of objects such as towers, hills, river-banks, &c., and he compressed every subject by bringing materials together from all quarters. He almost invariably altered the character of what he saw in order to attain some expression that he desired. His dominant impulses were to make things more beautiful, mysterious, and sublime than they are in nature. His system of light and shade was founded at first on the old masters with their heavy darks; but afterwards in his more independent maturity he worked out another scheme, that of pale general tones with a few strong darks for opposition. Turner was in various ways clever in black and white. Almost all his work done directly from nature consisted of memoranda in chalk or pencil, on gray or white paper, without colour, the colour being often added afterwards from memory. He was also an excellent etcher in pure line, but did not attempt to combine line and shade (except slight indications of shade) in etching, trusting for that to the finishing of his plates in mezzotint. His etched work is the Liber Studiorum, begun in 1807 and cut short in 1819. It was to have consisted of 100 plates, of which seventy-one were completed. As a water-colour painter Turner was unrivalled in delicacy and in brilliance of execution, but he never became technically one of the supreme painters in oil, nor did he make progress in his later work, which resembled water-colour in principles of treatment. Turner's position in art is that of one of the three most famous landscape-painters (Claude, Turner, Corot). In knowledge of nature he was far superior to the other two, in the sense of elegance at least their equal, and there was a tragic side to his genius that is wanting in the others. Turner has had singularly little practical influence on landscape art, which has gone more in the direction of Constable.
Although by nature very reserved and disposed to keep aloof from mankind, Turner was sometimes friendly and nobly generous. The object of his saving was to found an asylum for distressed artists, an intention plainly expressed in his will, but thwarted by the lawyers because the testator was ignorant of legal forms. Turner kept many pictures that had proved unsaleable at first, though tempting offers were made for them later, and he bequeathed them to the National Gallery on condition that they were to be kept together in rooms bearing his name. Whilst the estimate of his work has risen, it is now understood that his intellect was that of a prodigy with abnormal activity in one direction and feebleness or incapacity in almost all others. His personal appearance too was against him, as he was plain and short and had not the style or bearing of a gentleman.
The following are a few of the most important chronological memoranda of Turner's professional career. 1796, he exhibited eleven pictures at the
Royal Academy. 1798, he began to paint mountain scenery, and an effect in the view of Norham Castle, which did much to found his reputation. 1799, date of a naval picture, the Battle of the Nile. 1802, ceased to pay deference to topographic truth, and painted his famous but anti-topographical picture of Kilchurn Castle. 1803, beginning of continental subjects: 'The Vintage at Mâcon,' 'Calais Pier,' also first studies of the Alps. 1806, imaginative picture of the 'Garden of the Hesperides, with the Goddess of Discord choosing the Apple.' 1807, Turner invited a comparison between himself and Claude, by painting his 'Sun rising in Mist' in rivalry with the French master. 1811, 'Apollo and the Python.' 1813, 'The Frosty Morning.' 1815, 'Crossing the Brook,' an idealisation of Devonshire scenery; also the imaginary 'Dido building Carthage.' 1823, an idealisation of Italy in the 'Bay of Baiae,' and idealised views of Yorkshire in Whitaker's History of Richmondshire, marking a great progress in illustration. 1824, The Rivers of England. 1825, The Provincial Antiquities of Scotland. 1827-38, the England and Wales series. 1829, the great imaginative picture, 'Ulysses deriding Polyphemus.' 1832, an idealisation of Italy in 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.' 1830-34, vignette illustrations of Rogers' Poems. 1834, illustrations to Scott. 1833-35, The Rivers of France. 1834, 'The Golden Bough,' a poetical picture. 1838, 'Phryne going to the Bath as Venus.' (In these years Turner's idealising faculty attained its utmost development.) 1839, 'The Temeraire.' (In 1840 he entered on his decline.) 1843, 'Opening of the Walhalla,' 'The Approach to Venice,' and 'The Sun of Venice'—the two latter remarkably beautiful though unreal. 1844, 'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' a purely impressionist picture attempting the severance of motion from substance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Modern Painters, by John Ruskin, M.A., in 5 vols., first published by Messrs Smith and Elder at different dates between 1843 and 1860. This brilliant and famous book did much to increase Turner's reputation amongst the reading classes, but did not create his position, as he had already been for forty-one years an Academician, and had attained wealth and success when the first volume appeared. Mr Ruskin estimated Turner's rank as that of 'the greatest painter of all time,' which is very disputable on technical grounds, especially with reference to his work in oil. A Life of Turner by Mr Walter Thornbury appeared in 1862, a carelessly constructed biography, being hardly better than a collection of materials. The next Life was that by the writer of the present notice. It appeared in 1878, and was little more than an attempt to put already existing materials into a readable form, as at that date it had become almost impossible to add to them anything of any real importance. In 1879 appeared a Life of Turner by Mr Cosmo Monkhouse, which added whatever new details could be ascertained, and contained some valuable biographical criticisms. In 1889 the present writer published a new and shorter Life of Turner in French at the Bibliothèque de l'Art, Paris. All biographies of Turner must, however, be inevitably meagre and unsatisfactory, as the materials were collected too late and Turner himself left hardly any letters or writings of any kind, and his few notes are very brief. Public interest is concentrated in his works, he himself being so little attractive as a subject for the writer or reader of biography.